After scrubbing or altering government websites of research they don't agree with, cutting back on science advisory committees, and ordering government scientists to clam up, this is where we're heading with Trump as president. From Science.com ...
Why is this a problem? Let me share a story I published in my book, The Myth of the Free Market, and then posted eight years ago on this site.
WE DON'T NEED YOUR STINKING RESEARCH
In an effort to explain the logic behind market economics, in my book I tell the story of Russia's peasant economies after the October Revolution of 1917. One of the biggest problems Russia ran into was getting peasant farmers to produce. Things took a turn for the worse during Russia's Civil War (c. 1918-1922), when the nation was faced with frustrated revolutionaries and mass starvation. This was a critical moment since Russian revolutionaries wanted to sell surplus agricultural production to facilitate industrialization.
But there were no surpluses.
While agriculture production would increase with the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, the program was abandoned by Josef Stalin and replaced with forced collectivization. Not surprisingly, agriculture production slipped, again.
To better understand why revolutionary peasants weren't producing surpluses - which were necessary to help fund industrialization - teams of anthropologists were sent to study peasants societies throughout Russia. This was a tremendous undertaking as it meant spending months, and even years, at a time in distant rural communities. And the findings were extraordinary.
PEASANT STUDIES & "UNCLE JOE"
Headed by researchers like Aleksander Chayanov, various institutes studied and learned about peasant societies throughout Russia. One key finding was that peasants would work until they had enough to feed their families, and not much beyond this point. As I point out in my book, they learned that subsistence peasant households didn't particularly care about wage or price incentives. Instead, for a variety of reasons (discussed in class), they focused primarily on the “use-value” of a good in the immediate term rather than its “exchange-value” in a market.
Producing more than what they needed was viewed as “drudgery.”
Though the findings of Chayanov and others were instructive because they helped explain what was wrong with collectivization in the Russian countryside, they didn’t sit well with Stalin. He wanted to know how he could get peasants to produce. As a result, because of his own paranoia and twisted world views, he saw the reports emerging from the countryside as an unwarranted defense of rich kulaks (productive peasant farmers). All Stalin knew was that the revolutionary state demanded surpluses, and the peasants weren't producing.
Stalin saw traitors in his midst.
After Stalin took control of Russian agriculture the studies done by Chayanov and others were virtually ignored by the Soviet state, and many institutes were closed. But this was just the beginning. Repression and purges in the early 1930s were followed with large-scale disappearances of "non-revolutionaries."
Because of his research, Chayanov was among those branded a non-revolutionary. He was arrested, tried, and then shot on the same day in 1937 [photo below is not Chayanov].
In Stalin's world, the Russian revolution and the worker's paradise would be a success, even if he had to use the levers of the state to suppress scientific research, spin lies, send misfits to labor camps, or even kill his political enemies (both real and imagined).
The United States and the rest of the world are supposed to be better than this.
- Mark
As a reminder, the scientific method and the pursuit of knowledge has always been integral to the American ideal, as this clip from Neil deGrasse Tyson makes clear.
_______________________________
WE DON'T NEED YOUR STINKING RESEARCH
In an effort to explain the logic behind market economics, in my book I tell the story of Russia's peasant economies after the October Revolution of 1917. One of the biggest problems Russia ran into was getting peasant farmers to produce. Things took a turn for the worse during Russia's Civil War (c. 1918-1922), when the nation was faced with frustrated revolutionaries and mass starvation. This was a critical moment since Russian revolutionaries wanted to sell surplus agricultural production to facilitate industrialization.
But there were no surpluses.
While agriculture production would increase with the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, the program was abandoned by Josef Stalin and replaced with forced collectivization. Not surprisingly, agriculture production slipped, again.
To better understand why revolutionary peasants weren't producing surpluses - which were necessary to help fund industrialization - teams of anthropologists were sent to study peasants societies throughout Russia. This was a tremendous undertaking as it meant spending months, and even years, at a time in distant rural communities. And the findings were extraordinary.
PEASANT STUDIES & "UNCLE JOE"
Headed by researchers like Aleksander Chayanov, various institutes studied and learned about peasant societies throughout Russia. One key finding was that peasants would work until they had enough to feed their families, and not much beyond this point. As I point out in my book, they learned that subsistence peasant households didn't particularly care about wage or price incentives. Instead, for a variety of reasons (discussed in class), they focused primarily on the “use-value” of a good in the immediate term rather than its “exchange-value” in a market.
Producing more than what they needed was viewed as “drudgery.”
Though the findings of Chayanov and others were instructive because they helped explain what was wrong with collectivization in the Russian countryside, they didn’t sit well with Stalin. He wanted to know how he could get peasants to produce. As a result, because of his own paranoia and twisted world views, he saw the reports emerging from the countryside as an unwarranted defense of rich kulaks (productive peasant farmers). All Stalin knew was that the revolutionary state demanded surpluses, and the peasants weren't producing.
Stalin saw traitors in his midst.
After Stalin took control of Russian agriculture the studies done by Chayanov and others were virtually ignored by the Soviet state, and many institutes were closed. But this was just the beginning. Repression and purges in the early 1930s were followed with large-scale disappearances of "non-revolutionaries."
Because of his research, Chayanov was among those branded a non-revolutionary. He was arrested, tried, and then shot on the same day in 1937 [photo below is not Chayanov].
In Stalin's world, the Russian revolution and the worker's paradise would be a success, even if he had to use the levers of the state to suppress scientific research, spin lies, send misfits to labor camps, or even kill his political enemies (both real and imagined).
The United States and the rest of the world are supposed to be better than this.
- Mark
As a reminder, the scientific method and the pursuit of knowledge has always been integral to the American ideal, as this clip from Neil deGrasse Tyson makes clear.
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